Stability and Control Investigations of Generic 53 Degree Swept Wing with Control Surfaces

A contribution for the assessment of the static and dynamic aerodynamic behavior of a generic unmanned combat air vehicle configuration with control devices using computational fluid dynamics methods is given. For the study, various computational approaches have been used to predict stability and control parameters for aircraft undergoing nonlinear flight conditions. For the computational fluid dynamics simulations, three different computational fluid dynamics solvers are used: the unstructured grid-based solvers DLR TAU code and USM3D from NASA, as well as the structured grid-based National Aerospace Laboratory/NLR solver ENSOLV. The numerical methods are verified by experimental wind-tunnel data. The correlations with experimental data are made for static longitudinal/lateral sweeps and at varying frequencies of prescribed roll/pitch/yaw sinusoidal motions for the vehicle operating with and without control surface deflections. Furthermore, the investigations should support the understanding of the flow physics around the trailing-edge control devices of highly swept configurations with a vortex-dominated flowfield. Design requirements should be drawn by analyzing the interaction between the vortical flow and the control devices. The present work is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Science and Technology Organization/ Applied Vehicle Technology Task Group AVT-201 on stability and control prediction methods´.